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THE 

Message of Peace 

BY ^/ 

REV. R. W. CHURCH 



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PHILADELPHIA 

HENRY ALTEMUS 



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COPYRIGHTED 1896 

by HENRY ALTEMUS 



Henry Altemus, Manufacturer 

PHILADELPHIA 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

" Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will 
towards men." — ST. Luke ii. 14. 



THE Song of the Angels was the first 
public preaching of the Gospel of Jesus 
Christ. Its advent had been announced pri- 
vately to those who were elected to be its 
instrument, in dream and vision, in angelic 
salutation, in inspirations of the Holy Ghost. 
To Zacharias in the Temple, to Mary in the 
secret chamber, in the night watches to 
Joseph, in the joy of her unborn child to 
Elisabeth, the assurance of its approach had 
been given. It had been recognized and 
welcomed in words such as had never yet 
burst from the hearts of men, from human 
gladness, from human hope — " My soul doth 
magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced 
in God my Saviour." "Blessed be the Lord 
God of Israel, for He hath visited and 
redeemed His people," and among those 
unknown and hidden souls who were called 



4 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

to bear its first glory and its first burden, its 
special significance was proclaimed. " Through 
the tender mercy of our God, whereby the 
Dayspring from on high hath visited us, to 
give light to them that sit in darkness and in 
the shadow of death, and to guide our feet 
into the way of peace/ ' 

But beyond the sacred home at Nazareth, 
and in the priestly city in the hill-country of 
Judah, the first announcement to those out- 
side, to the representatives of those "poor 
to whom the Gospel was to be preached/' 
was in the angelic visit and the angelic "Gospel 
of great joy," to the shepherds who were 
watching in the fields where the patriarchs 
had fed their flocks. Their hymn of praise, 
which was the first news to the world that its 
Saviour was come, was also the first note in 
that triumphant song of deliverance, which 
was taken up by the Church below, to be 
continued day by day through the centuries 
over all the earth, and never to cease till it 
shall swell into the " new song " of the Church 
above. With the Lord's Prayer, with the 
Magnificat and Benedictus and Nunc Dimittis, 
it became a stated and necessary part of the 
public language of the Church in its most 
solemn worship. In its highest offering of 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 5 

Eucharistic praise, the words of the Seraphim 
in the Temple under the Old Dispensation, 
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts, are 
answered by those of the Angels around 
Bethlehem in the New—-" Glory to God in the 
highest, and on earth peace, good will towards 
men/' 

" On earth peace." That was what the 
Angels saw of special significance to mankind, 
in the " glad tidings " which they announced. 
It was a message of peace : may we not on 
Christmas Day spend a few minutes in think- 
ing of what so filled the thoughts and quick- 
ened the joy of the Angels ? 

"The Gospel a message of peace." I am 
afraid that in not a few who hear such words, 
they may raise a smile. They will think of 
the course of history to this hour, and ask 
whether it does not furnish a comment of the 
most supreme irony on the words and claims 
of the " Gospel of peace." They will ask 
whether it has brought peace into the dis- 
tracted and disturbed souls and thoughts of 
men, torn and divided between counter ap- 
pearances, by conflicting proofs, by irreconcil- 
able trains of reasoning, by opposing forms 
and tendencies of their own nature ? They 
will ask whether it ever yet reconciled the 



6 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

world, — all its sins, its mistakes, its wishes 
and strivings for better things, its incorrigible 
faults, with God its maker, its hope, its fear ? 
Is that great body of mankind which St. Paul 
described as alienated from God and at 
enmity with Him through wicked works, now 
after all the long years really more at peace 
with Him ? reconciled to His government, to 
His righteousness, to His claims ? What 
shall we say of that " vision of peace," which 
was ever before the minds of the prophets, 
and that peace which was the solemn and 
parting bequest of our Master, which was 
the perpetual benediction and salutation of 
apostles to all Christian souls ? How much 
of that "peace of God which passeth all 
understanding/ ' which is invoked weekly and 
daily upon us, to go with us when we pass 
from God's altar or His sanctuary, really 
descends upon our Christian society ? True, 
Jesus Christ said also Himself, that He came 
to bring not peace but a sword : His life was 
a life of conflict, of war without rest or pause 
against opposing evil. But is it only the con- 
flict between good and evil which disturbs 
peace? Is it only the war between Christ 
and Belial — is that the simple and sufficient 
account of the quarrels and divisions of men, 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE, 7 

of the jars and hatreds which fill the souls, 
and which like the troubled sea can never 
* rest ? Is this enough to account for the ani- 
mosities of neighborhoods, of social circles, 
of classes, of parties, of Churches ? Is it 
credible that in these enmities, the good and 
the certainty should be all on one side, and 
the evil and the mistakes all on the other ? 
Is this really the " sword," which Jesus Christ 
said that He came to bring — the sword 
against nothing but unrighteousness and sin ? 
or is it not rather the negative of the peace 
which He loves and which He gave us, the 
peace which He died to purchase and plant 
in the world, the peace which is His supreme 
and Eternal blessing to all that live ? I do 
not ask these questions now to look for their 
answer, or to seek for the account to be given 
of the strange contrast between the Gospel 
message of peace, and the palpable facts of 
history and social life. That is not the busi- 
ness of to-day. But I do ask them, in order 
to help this day's services to bring home to 
our own separate consciences the fact itself 
of this contrast. I ask them that each one 
of us may honestly put it to himself, "what 
part have I in the faults that must be some- 
where ? How much am I to blame for this 



8 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE, 

ugly and hateful thwarting of the purpose of 
God ? " 

We cannot perhaps go into the tangled 
skein of sins and mistakes, and necessities 
created by sins, which have in the course of 
ages so strongly turned aside the fulfilment 
of the Gospel of peace, and brought us to 
where we are — quarrelling, fighting, seeing 
nothing inconsistent and perplexing in vio- 
lence, revenge, destruction. But we can do 
this. We can do something to see that our 
own hearts, and consciences, and thoughts, 
have before them the true standard and ideal 
of peace, which was one of the new charac- 
teristics of the Gospel announced by the 
Angels. We can, for ourselves, train and 
bridle feelings and impulses, in the serious 
belief that Christ means us in every way that 
is possible, as a great and paramount duty, to 
follow peace. If anything is certain, it is 
that a peaceful temper, a temper which loves, 
and honors, and desires peace, is of the 
essence of the Christian character. " Follow 
peace with all men," says the apostle, "and 
holiness without which no man shall see the 
Lord." 

"Peace and purity." These are the two 
capital points in which the Gospel was an 






THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 9 

innovation and revelation in the moral stand- 
ard of the ancient world. The ancient world 
had noble, if imperfect, ideas of courage, of 
justice; it had noble thoughts of friendship; 
it had noble conceptions of public duty and 
of a man's debt to his country. But it looked 
upon war and conflict as the natural field for 
the highest virtues, as it looked upon purity 
as a matter of varying expediency and uncer- 
tain sentiment. It looked on the world as a 
battle-field for the trial of strength between 
nations and men, as science would sometimes 
fain see in the struggle for life an account of 
the natural world as we find it. It had no 
misgivings about strife and war : they were 
what men were born to by the law of their 
existence, conditions which none could alter 
which none with honor could escape from. 
It was a great reversal of all accepted moral 
judgment, of all popular traditions, of all cur- 
rent assumptions, when the teaching of the 
Gospel put in the forefront of its message, 
God's value for peace, and His blessing upon 
it ; when it placed peace as a divine and mag- 
nificent object to be aimed at and sought for, 
with the earnestness with which men aimed at 
glory. When it set high among its own new 
Beatitudes, high among the tempers and vir- 




io THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

tues which were to renew mankind, the spirit, 
the self-restraints, which make for peace. As 
it made us know what God thinks of purity, 
so it made us know what God thinks of 
peace. And both announcements were, in 
the strength with which they were made, sur- 
prises to the world. Both were corrections 
of men's natural and long accepted ideas. 
Both raised the imperfect moral standards of 
men to a divinely-sanctioned height, and how- 
ever in practice Christians may have fallen 
short of them, these standards of what is true 
and right never have been, and never can be 
lowered. 

It is a truism that Christianity is a religion 
of peace. It is also a truism that Christians 
have often made it a religion of quarrels, per- 
secutions, and bloodshed, and that custom 
makes us strangely insensible to the anomaly 
of a religion of peace, compatible with strife, 
tolerant of litigation, patient of war. The 
Church — not the world only, but the Church 
and Christian society, seems to have disap- 
pointed the hopes of Apostles, seems to have 
persisted in the path which the Prince of 
Peace came to lead it from. But however 
God may allow His purposes to be crossed by 
the weakness and disobedience and perverse- 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. n 

ness of man, what we individually have to 
consider is, whether we will associate our- 
selves with what we know to be His voice; 
or whether we will ignore it, neglect it, prefer 
to it ideals of our own, measures of right 
which are not His. You say that you cannot 
make the world other than it is. Of course 
you cannot : the world is not given you either 
to understand, or to govern, or to change. 
But there is one thing which you can do, you 
can prevent yourself from being like the 
world in its evil. — True, indeed, amid its fierce 
jarring elements, its passions that none can 
tame, its imperious public opinion, its long 
settled customs, its fixed rules of honor, of 
expediency, of prudence, of interest, its vast 
and scientific machinery, created only be- 
cause of the vast scale on which men and 
nations do carry on their implacable quarrels, 
the strongest may well feel powerless — as 
powerless as we feel amid the irresistible 
forces of nature. True also, there are other 
virtues besides those of peace. There are for 
Christ's disciples, the virtues, and there are 
the occasions, of resistance, of conflict, of at- 
tack, of war without truce, not merely in the 
religious, but in the political and secular 
sphere of duty. It would be an evil day when 



12 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

a Christian became deaf to the public call on 
his manliness, his courage, his daring, his 
self-devotion. There are solemn times when 
he has not only to die, but to fight and make 
others die. These are times when, for the 
sake of his brethren, for the sake of truth, 
for the sake of his Master, he must resist 
evil, falsehood, disobedience, wrong. Yet for 
all this, it remains true that Christ's religion 
is the religion of peace ; and till we feel how 
serious and earnest the New Testament is in 
the honor which it gives to peace, we have 
missed its spirit. If, while this world lasts, 
the divisions of mankind are too strong for 
peace, if in the struggle of "mighty oppo- 
sites" our strength goes for nothing, at least 
we, each one of us, are lords over ourselves. 
One thing, at least whatever else is not, is 
given over to our power : our heart and will. 
In this little corner of the world we hold do- 
minion. This drop, it may be, in the stream 
of influence is ours to deal with ; is ours to 
be responsible for. Whether we will or no, 
men round us, our friends perhaps, will quar- 
rel, and take and give offence, and heap up 
wrongs, and settle into estrangement, and 
lose all power of doing justice to one another; 
step by step endurance is exhausted, and 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 13 

honor is supposed to be touched, and the law, 
perhaps, is appealed to, and the wound to 
peace becomes incurable. We look on and 
judge; we cannot, it may be, prevent it ; but 
at least we can be warned, we can help imi- 
tating it. Again, whether we will or no, re- 
ligious dissension will continue to set the 
world in flame. Apostles themselves were 
not able to bridle it ; and in its train, the bit- 
terest rancor still justifies itself under the 
name of zeal for God's truth, and injustice 
and persecution are defended out of jealousy 
for His honor. We cannot stop heresies, 
schism, divisions : we cannot chain down 
party spirit, and make men fair ; but at least 
in these inevitable differences of thought 
and conviction, we can take care of our 
own hearts : we need not be little because 
others are : we need not be unfair, because 
others are : we need not forget our own short- 
sightedness, our prejudices, our own obli- 
gation to the great law of charity and justice, 
because others have no misgivings in their 
judgment, and no limits to their hatreds. 
Again, whether we will or no, the day is 
doubtless far distant, when the nations will 
not learn war any more : it is something, 
that some slight and imperfect approaches 



i 4 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE 

have been made to it ; but we are told only 
too truly that it is a dream to think that it is 
yet coming. But for all that, the Song of the 
Angels is God's supreme benediction to the 
earth, " on earth peace, good will towards 
men." In all that, the King of all the ages, 
the Lord of Hosts, is the " Prince of Peace." 
Surely when He speaks of peace, He means 
peace ; He means the tempers of peace, the 
moderation and self-restraint of peace, the 
strong sense of equity, the curbing of ambi- 
tion, the aversion to boastfulness, and vio- 
lence, and insolent self-assertion, which are 
the conditions and pledges of peace. What 
will He say, at His judgment seat, of the 
great swelling words of pride and defiance of 
which history is full ? What will He say of 
those national antipathies and hatreds, so 
lightly and easily kindled, so obstinate when 
once kindled, so unreasoning, so ignorant, so 
absolutely proof to argument or remon- 
strance, which have turned the fairest lands 
of the world into fields of blood ? Will He 
accept, at the bar of Eternal justice, as a 
plea for precipitate and needless wars, the 
" proud instincts of an imperial race ?" No, 
if we know anything of the mind of Jesus 
Christ, He will not. Such things may be 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 15 

utterly out of our power to hinder or influ- 
ence. Such things may be right, as a philos- 
ophy which denies or refuses Jesus Christ, 
and accepts as the best that old world which 
He came to change, and transform, and renew. 
But we Christians, who shall have to give 
an account for every idle word, we shall 
surely have to give an account for every vain- 
glorious, every reckless, every insolent word, 
by which, in our businesss, our religion, our 
conduct as citizens, our social relations, our 
many contests, peace has been endangered, 
or has been made more difficult. 

May God keep us ever from trifling with 
that sacred name of peace. May He keep us 
from undervaluing it, in comparison with 
our own aims and purposes, even though dis- 
interested and high. May He keep us from 
thinking lightly of what He loves so well : 
what He has made the symbol and crown of 
His great work of mercy to man ; which He 
has inspired all His servants, psalmist and 
prophet, Angels and apostles, to desire and 
long for, and rejoice in : in which His Son 
sums up His complete gift and blessing to 
His redeemed. " Peace on earth." " Peace 
I leave with you." "Peace be unto you." 
" The peace of God which passeth all under- 



16 THE MESSAGE OF PEACE. 

standing." Do not let any one cheat us out 
of our inheritance of peace, tempt us from 
our duty to peace, by saying that God means 
peace for Heaven, not for earth. He means 
it for time as well as for eternity. It belongs 
to those who will have it, who are in earnest 
about it — outwardly y much more than men 
choose to believe — inwardly, altogether. Let 
us in the name of the God of peace defy the 
mocking voices, which appeal to experience 
to prove that the world can be but a great 
scene of strife, that none but enthusiasts can 
dream here of peace. That will be according 
as we master — and by God's grace we can 
master — the powers of evil which are enemies 
to peace. 

" Whence come wars and fightings among 
you ? Come they not hence, even from your 
lusts that war in your members?" "The 
works of the flesh are manifest — hatred, vari- 
ance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, 
heresies, envyings." V/hat Christian can 
dare to say that the works of the spirit are 
beyond his attainment, beyond his trying — 
" love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, 
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance " ? 
And where these are, there y in the words of 
another apostle, " The fruit of righteousness 
is sown in peace, by them that make peace." 



THE MESSAGE OF PEACE, 17 

Surely not sown in vain, even in the midst of 
this wilful and troublesome world. Let us 
listen in earnest to this last great word, 
which the departing year once more repeats 
from the mouths of the Angels. Let us be 
sure that we hear in them the very will of 
God, the very heart's desire of Jesus Christ. 
Let us be sure that in them is a secret mes- 
sage, a warning, or encouragement to each 
one of our own consciences. The religion 
which comes to us from Bethlehem and from 
Calvary is, " Glory to God in the highest, and 
on earth peace." 

May the God of peace who loved us all 
with such wondrous love, teach us something 
of that blessed Gospel. May He forgive us 
all those miserable, those amazing little- 
nesses, so mean yet so fatal; the jealousies, 
the irritability, the sensitiveness, the guilty 
selfishnesses, by whatever fine names we call 
them, to which we so wantonly sacrifice His 
holy peace. 

May He pardon us our careless, or disdain- 
ful, or treacherous words against what is so 
sacred in His eyes. May He answer our 
prayer in the largeness of His generous 
mercy, beyond the meaning we ourselves put 
upon it. " O Lamb of God, that takest away 
the sins of the world, Grant us thy Peace. ,, 



MAN'S IDEALS. 



MAN'S IDEALS. 

' Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under 
the elements of the world. But when the fulness of the 
time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a 
woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were 
under the law, that we might receive the adoption of 
sons." — Gal. iv. 3-5. 



CHRISTMAS, with its tender and bright, 
and touching, and humbling thoughts, 
brings with it the remembrance of the pro- 
found change in the nature and position of 
man, which followed on the coming of the 
Son of God in the flesh. God came and 
visited His creatures, " and was made man." 
Henceforth, man is what God his Maker has 
been. He has that nature, he lives that life, 
he dies that death, which he has in common 
with the awful Being who was born in Bethle- 
hem, and is to judge him. From that time 
man was lifted up to a level far above any- 
thing that this world of time had ever known. 
A new order began, which had not been 
before. It is spoken of in St. Paul as a 



22 MAN'S IDEALS. 

"new creation/' "a new man." If we think 
of what St. Paul teaches of this great change, 
consequent on the Incarnation, and caused by 
it, the words, strong as they are, are not too 
strong. 

The results, the developments of this great 
change, have, we know, changed all human 
history. Far beyond their direct and 
acknowledged influence, they have swayed 
the world and its movements. They have 
penetrated far and wide into all human life, 
all human ideas, all human character, and 
activity, and motive. They have altered the 
proportions and the meaning of our present 
stage of being. They have made it at once, 
infinitely more sacred and precious, and infin- 
itely of less account. They have turned the 
eternal farewells of death into the tender 
commendations to Christ's mercy and for- 
giveness and peace, and into the transporting 
hope of the vision of God. Great, and mani- 
fold, and inexhaustible are the workings in 
mankind of that change, of which human 
language cannot adequately give the measure. 
For a few moments this morning, I will say a 
few words about one of them. 

Consider, then, what has happened, since 
that coming in the flesh which we are think- 



MAN'S IDEALS. 23 

ing of to-day, in relation to the Ideal of 
man ; the Ideal of what he should be, of his 
character, of his perfection ; the Ideal of 
man before Christ came to us ; the Ideal of 
man since we have known Him, and He has 
been with us. 

1. Man has never been able to live without 
his Ideal. The wildest savages, the rudest 
barbarians, have their ideals, as well as we, of 
what man should be. But the ideal of the 
natural man, of man before the great change 
of the Gospel, could be a high and noble one. 
There was such an ideal when human society 
rose step by step out of brutality and license 
into the great civilized states of the heathen 
world, when the love of one's fellow-men 
showed itself in the form of enthusiastic 
loyalty to that country which embraced them 
all ; when the state was the object of affection 
and devotion ; when a common citizenship 
was the great acknowledged bond; public- 
spirited readiness to do and to sacrifice 
anything for one's country was the height — 
and who can deny that it was a very noble 
one — of human goodness. Nay, there was 
something known, even beyond that, though it 
was a unique and barren instance ; but men 
had known and learned to admire and honor, 



24 MAN'S IDEALS. 

but not to imitate, one who had, like Socrates, 
died for the Truth, and died to do good to 
those who slew him. Courage, patriotism, 
honor, self-sacrifice for the right, and a care 
for all the ties of kindred and the tendernesses 
of friendship, were no unworthy ideals ; and 
they were the ideals of Greece and Rome. 
Justice, and fortitude, and self-mastery, and 
wisdom, and duty faithfully and exactly dis- 
charged at any cost, were the standard already 
acknowledged there, by unregenerate men. 
They were compatible with much that lowered 
and spoiled them. They were often in fact 
associated with terrible sins ; but often, to 
our own shame and humiliation, men who 
knew not our Lord, recognized their obliga- 
tions, and partially fulfilled them. These 
were the ideals of the West, of those from 
whom we have inherited our traditions of 
social right and order. The ideals which 
men reached to in the East were even more 
remarkable. Centuries before our Lord came 
there was a great religious reformation in 
India. We know it by the name of Bud- 
dhism. The ideal of this was complete sacri- 
fice of all that was pleasant to flesh and 
blood, for the sake of the soul — to deliver 
the soul from the passions, and ignorance, and 



MAN'S WEALS. 25 

slavery, and burdens of this mortality. And 
it was accompanied by two things : the most 
passionate enthusiasm to communicate with, 
and so to help and deliver others ; and a 
spirit of tender and all-embracing kindness, 
which expressed itself in the most touching 
language, and embodied itself in the most 
touching acts ; which sought out the forlorn 
and the miserable, and which willingly asso- 
ciated itself with the degradation of the 
outcast, and with the shame and doom of the 
sinner. This ideal did once exist among 
men, however soon it came to be alloyed 
with superstition, and hardened into formal- 
ism; however little it actually was able to 
raise and to console men ; however mixed it 
was with fantastic extravagances which we 
here are not able to understand. It was a 
law of action which prescribed to itself, in 
spirit and will, the meaning of the Second 
Table of the Decalogue; which required a 
man to keep nothing for himself, but to spend 
and be spent for others ; which required him 
to hide every good deed, and to make the 
most open and minute avowal of all his faults ; 
which demanded from the proudest and the 
mightiest the confession of that common lot 
of error and sin and weakness which they 



26 MANS IDEALS. 

shared with the humblest ; which could inspire 
the love and the courage of the martyr, and 
give power over the hearts of men, and 
teach the lesson of noble resignation and 
obedience, and raise up a great company of 
preachers, as gentle and tolerant as they 
were earnest and unwearied. Such an ideal 
was presented to the men of the East before 
our Lord appeared. 

These ideals, different as they are, are the 
greatest that history shows us in the Gentile 
world, before the Incarnation, and there was 
this feature common to all of them. They 
almost, or altogether, left out God. Not but 
that the name of God, and still more, the 
names of "Gods many and Lords many,' 1 
were on men's lips, and the memorials of 
them before their eyes. Not that the awful 
and mysterious name of God did not awaken 
in the serious Greek or Roman the presage of 
his Maker, his Ruler, the Judge of right, the 
Avenger of wrong. But his moral Ideal stood 
by itself, on its own foundations. It did not 
need God. It did not aspire to God. It did 
without Him. And to the highest ideals of 
the East, God was not even an imagination 
or a name. With the deep and spiritual 
meaning which they read into what are the 



MAN'S IDEALS. 27 

Commandments of the Second Table, they 
were absolutely and resolutely blind to the 
First. The world to them was "empty," 
except of evil ; to these ascetics of self-con- 
quest, beneficence, and patient humility, it 
was " empty even of God." And their high- 
est hope was not immortality, but annihila- 
tion. 

Great and wonderful and sometimes over- 
powering are all these fragmentary forms of 
goodness — reflections of the mind of the All- 
perfect, when we meet with them in the old 
world — " Light shining in the darkness, and 
the darkness comprehending it not." Let us 
thank God that even to them who knew Him 
not His Spirit witnessed in their hearts and 
consciences to His Law and Righteousness : 
— witnessed for justice, for purity, for humil- 
ity, for loving-kindness, for an unselfish and 
public zeal. Why should we not acknowledge 
and reverence them, though they were so 
evanescent, though they failed to perpetuate 
themselves, though they were so maimed and 
imperfect, though they had no spring in them 
of recovery and self-correction ? They were 
for their time. But they had no root. They 
blossomed, and withered away, and left no 
fruit. Yet God was pleased to be patient 



28 MAN'S IDEALS. 

with what St. Paul calls "the times of this 
ignorance," till " the fulness of the time was 
come." We may look back at them, and 
their history, in silent awe, and leave them in 
His hands till He comes to judgment. 

But to us the "times of ignorance" are 
past. There had been an ideal of man in the 
world all the while of a very different kind. 
One family of mankind had preserved the 
great faith that man was the object of God's 
care and love, and that he was fit to be the 
object of God's care. Promise and legisla- 
tion and history, the songs and complaints 
and raptures of Psalmists, the terrible les- 
sons and unearthly visions of Prophets, had 
kept up this faith. One great theme, in every 
conceivable variation, sounds through the 
whole of the Old Testament, and it is this : 
" O God, Thou art my God ; early will I seek 
Thee, my flesh also longeth after Thee, in a 
barren and dry land where no water is. Thus 
have I looked for Thee in holiness, that I might 
behold Thy power and glory. For Thy lov- 
ing kindness is better than the life itself : my 
lips shall praise Thee." "Like as the hart 
desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul 
after Thee, O God. My soul is athirst for 
God, yea, even for the living God : when shall 



MAN'S IDEALS. 29 

I come to appear before the presence of 
God?*' Man was made to know and to love 
the living God ; and the living God, who had 
made man, meant Himself to be known and 
loved by His creature. Man was lifted up 
from being the head of the visible creation 
here : from being the noblest and most richly- 
endowed with gifts and powers of all living 
things on earth, and also, because so great in 
his instincts and aspirations and yet so weak 
and frail, really the unhappiest — he was lifted 
up to feel that he belonged to a world beyond 
the bounds of mortality and sight ; that he 
had to do with the righteousness and the love 
of the Everlasting and the All-merciful ; that 
he might hope, in spite of sin and pain and 
death, to be of the family of the Holiest, in 
the "land of the living/' Long before our 
Lord came, the foundation of man's ideal had 
been laid in the first and great commandment 
— "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with 
all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with 
all thy mind, and with all thy strength." Ac- 
cording as man is called to do this, and is 
supposed capable of doing it, the ideal of man 
varies by a difference that nothing can bridge 
over. 
And at last God's time came. " In the be- 



30 MAN'S IDEALS. 

ginning was the Word, and the Word was with 
God, and the Word was God. . . . And the 
Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, 
full of grace and truth : and we beheld His 
glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the 
Father. He came to His own, and His own 
received Him not. But to as many as re- 
ceived Him, to them gave He power to 
become the children of God, to them that 
believe on His name." Such a revelation — 
such an opening of the unseen and eternal 
world — could not be, without a corresponding 
change in the standard and idea of what man 
was, of what he should be. It is shown in 
every page and every line of the New Testa- 
ment. 

For now, not to one family and nation, but 
to the whole world of mankind, was to be de- 
clared the relation in which man stood to 
God : that man might know God, and love 
God, and be knit and bound to God by the 
closest and most real of ties. That relation 
to the Father, dim in Western morality, lost 
in Eastern morality, was henceforth to oc- 
cupy its due and natural and commanding 
place, in the thoughts and feelings of man- 
kind. The huge gap in man's idea of his life 
was filled up. Man was not an orphan, thrown 



MAN'S IDEALS. 31 

destitute, like the shipwrecked sailor, on life,* 
not knowing whence he came, or what was 
his destiny ; he was not fatherless, the sport 
and victim of the blind forces of nature, with 
no living love and care above him, to which 
he might lift up his heart, and know that he 
was answered. He was not simply the crea- 
ture, the servant, the worshipper, the disciple, 
of the Unapproachable and Invisible, taught 
by His law, visited in secret by His mysteri- 
ous whispers to conscience, enlightened and 
comforted by the Holy Spirit of wisdom and 
of prophecy — he was thenceforth more than 
all this — for One had come to open his eyes 
to the realities of what he was made for, and 
amid which he lived : One who was like him, 
and spoke his words, and shared his lot : and 
He who thus came to him, and whom he saw, 
and touched, was God : God who made him : 
God, who from everlasting had been all in all 
to His creatures. Then, for the first time, he 
learned, as he had never learned before, what 
sin was. Then, for the first time, he learned 
the height and depth of the righteousness 

•" Turn porro puer, ut saevis projectus ab undis 
Navita, nudus, humi jacet, infans, indigus onini 
Vitali auxilio . . . 
Quoi tantum in vita restet transire malorum." 

Lucret. v. 



32 MAN'S IDEALS. 

of God. Then, for the first time, he knew 
what real forgiveness was. Then, for the first 
time, he knew what was waiting at the end of 
mortal life. A new character, not only of 
fresh moral force, but new altogether in spir- 
itual height and capacity and aspiration, ap- 
peared among men ; it wrought great things 
in the world, it was sung by great poets ; the 
character, in all its manifold variations of 
depth and power and beauty and majesty, of 
the Christian saint. Beside it, the glory, the 
real greatness of the heathen hero, took a 
lower place. Goodness, not strength, became 
the true measure of action ; and "the thoughts 
of men were widened/' from even the might- 
iest exploits and happiest hours on this scene 
of time, to the high purpose and noble pains 
of penitence and self-discipline, and to the 
ineffable joys of paradise. "The Spirit bear- 
eth witness with our spirit that we are the 
children of God ; and if children, then heirs ; 
heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ : if so 
be that we suffer with Him, that we may be 
also glorified together. . . . For the earnest 
expectation of the creature waiteth for the 
manifestation of the sons of God. . . . Be- 
cause the creature itself also shall be de- 
livered from the bondage of curruption into 
the glorious liberty of the children of God." 



MAN'S IDEALS. 33 

Could man's ideal, even the highest and the 
the noblest, remain the same, after such an- 
nouncements as these ? Is it conceivable, in 
the soberest reason, that after such things as 
these, man should think of himself, of what 
he is, and what he should be, as he had 
before ? Is it possible to overstate the nat- 
ural consequences of them ? And these things 
are what all we Christians believe. Nothing 
which confines man's action and responsibili- 
ties to the present can satisfy their claim : 
nothing — however great, however noble, how- 
ever urgent, however touching ; beyond all, 
there is the absorbing truth, that this is but 
a fragment of a life, and not a life complete 
and finished in itself — only the foreground of 
an endless perspective : that God our Maker 
has been with us to direct, to elevate, to save 
it : that of all man's relations to beings round 
him, his relations to God his Father are the 
greatest, to his Incarnate Redeemer, the 
deepest. Man has still to live his appointed 
days on earth. He must live then according 
to the conditions, physical, moral, social, 
which one greater than man has imposed 
upon him. He must live in society, and 
fulfil the obligations which social and polit- 
ical life imply and require. He must render 
3 



34 MANS IDEALS. 

to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. He 
must, if his life here is not to be a wreck and 
a ruin, submit himself to the law of duty, of 
reason, of conscience : he must tame the wild 
beast within him, he must crush the dull brute 
selfishness, which, at the very height of pol- 
ished civilization, would cut him off from his 
kind, in a deadly isolation from sympathy and 
help and love. But beyond all this, he has to 
think of something else. He has to think of 
himself, as not of this swiftly passing scene, 
but as belonging to a vaster system, from 
which there is no escape by being immersed 
in the present. He must think not only of 
those whom he now sees and speaks to, but 
of those too whom he will meet when he is 
dead. He must think of himself as taken out 
of the shows and appearances which each day 
brings with it, to be a partaker of what is per- 
manent and for ever. He has a pattern to 
aim at which is not of this world ; and that 
pattern is the life — if we may speak so with 
reverence— the character of Jesus Christ. He 
'has a fellowship not of this world, and this 
fellowship is with the Father and with the 
Son. He has a hope and a fear beyond any- 
thing conceivable here — the judgment seat of 
the Son of Man. 



MAN'S IDEALS. 35 

And on these things we are sometimes told 
that we ought, here in the pulpit, to be silent. 
We stand before the world, which is not so 
much disposed as it once was to let us off our 
profession of this great ideal of human life : 
and we are bid to realize it and make it good 
to the full, or else to hold our peace. Or we 
are told that it is superfluous to preach about 
these things : that they have been preached 
about for 1800 years, that every one knows 
them who cares to know them, and that for 
the rest they have ceased to have interest ; 
that it is time to attend to the real subjects 
of the day, to the calls of justice, to the 
redress of wrongs, to the wants and suffer- 
ings of those whose lot in the world is so 
frightfully unequal. Of course, if these 
things, the consequences of the Christian 
creed, are not true, it is not only superflu- 
ous to preach about them, but something 
much worse. But what if we are right in 
believing them to be true? Can anything 
be so unreasonable, as to believe such things 
and not to speak about them ? And, no doubt, 
it will be a bad day for Christian preaching, 
when it is not moved by wrong, or forgets the 
" comfortless trouble's sake of the needy, and 
the deep sighing of the poor/' and " the pa- 



36 MAX S IDEALS. 

tient abiding of the meek." Yes, it is the 
time — it is :he time to do this; it is 

eminently the time to do it now. But : 
taught us to do this ? Where and when did 
men learn this sympathy with suffering, this 
impatience of wrong ? Who, but He who 
came to make us sons of God, came also, 
the first of all, to* seek the lost, came, first 
of all, to preach the Gospel to the poor ? Who 
first taught men to copy His example; and 
what was it that had power to keep up the 
tradition of that unearthly example through 
:cr.:uries of selfishness and sin? When for 
1800 years men have done without Christ, 
and have risen to a higher morality and a 
more dif -Arrested beneficence, it may be 
time to tell us to do without Him. But 
that time is certainly not yet. But after all, 
this is no matter for paper arguments. Argu- 
ments have their great place, indispensable 
and important, but this great debate, which ? 
in one shape or another, has been going on 
through long ages, and will go on when we 
all are laid to rest, is not to be settled by 
them. There the great truths are, for us to 
take or to leave : with us it rests, whether the 
true answer shall be given or not, to those 
who question them. The real, silencing answer 



MAN'S IDEALS. 37 

is the lives of men, the lives of Christian be- 
lievers. The world may talk for ever, and 
talk to little purpose, about the reality of 
religion. The question really rests with us : 
whether our life is governed by such things 
as we are thinking of to-day : whether, what- 
ever we have to do, the consciousness of their 
truth is around us like the air we breathe: 
whether, from believing them, we are more 
true, more honest, more just, more patient, 
more pure, more self-denying, more cheer- 
fully helpful, more resigned and patient in 
trouble. O my brethren, be sure of this — 
this, amid the strife of tongues, is the trust- 
worthy and acceptable way of vindicating the 
ways of Him who has done so much for us. 
If only our lives will fairly stand the test 
which He has intended they should meet, we 
need not fear when we speak with our ene- 
mies in the gate. The Eternal wisdom might 
if He had pleased, have stopped for ever the 
mouths of the gainsayer and the doubter. He 
has not been pleased to do so. He chose His 
means of victory and salvation, for us, as for 
Himself, in the realities of a life, in doing and 
in suffering. May God forgive us for our 
miserable attempts to bring the life of faith 
into the life of work and business. May He 



38 MAN'S IDEALS. 

forgive us, who accept such great thoughts 
and hopes, for being content with such poor 
and intermittent efforts. May God help us to 
remember that now we are the sons of God, 
and to discern the import of those tremend- 
ous words — "Who, for us men and for our 
salvation, came down from heaven, and was 
incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin 
Mary, and was made man." 



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